Big money breaks out

The 100 biggest campaign donors gave $323 million in 2014 — almost as much as the $356 million given by the estimated 4.75 million people who gave $200 or less, a POLITICO analysis of campaign finance filings found.

And the balance almost certainly would tip far in favor of the mega-donors were the analysis to include nonprofit groups that spent at least $219 million — and likely much more — but aren’t required to reveal their donors’ identities.

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The numbers — gleaned from reports filed with the Federal Election Commission and the Internal Revenue Service — paint the most comprehensive picture to date of an electoral landscape in which the financial balance has tilted dramatically to the ultra-rich. They have taken advantage of a spate of recent federal court rulings, regulatory decisions and feeble or bumbling oversight to spend ever-greater sums in politics — sometimes raising questions about whether their bounty is being well spent. Yet their expanded giving power in 2014 was all the more stark, coming against a backdrop of what appears to be a surprising decline in the number of regular Americans contributing to campaigns, as well as a shift in political power and money to outside groups unburdened by the contribution restrictions handcuffing the political parties and their candidates.

Taken together, the trend lines reflect a new political reality in which a handful of superaffluent partisans can exert more sway over the campaign landscape than millions of donors of more average means. And that’s to say nothing of the overwhelming majority of voters who never spend so much as a single dime on politics. (The Center for Responsive Politics estimates that only 0.28 percent of American adults donate to campaigns.)

The widening imbalance revealed by POLITICO’s analysis illustrates “the insanity of this system” and is further discouragement to would-be small donors, asserted Larry Lessig, a Harvard professor who this year helped launch a self-described “crowdfunded” super PAC. Called Mayday PAC, it spent $10.6 million from a mix of micro- and mega-donors on a quixotic crusade to elect congressional candidates who it hoped would support policies that empower mom and pop contributors.

“As you see that your democracy is controlled by a smaller and smaller number of funders, you have less and less interest to be engaged in it,” said Lessig.

Yet the power of the ultra-rich was also ironically highlighted by Mayday’s own fundraising. It yielded a total of $3 million from just seven donors, most of whom made POLITICO’s top 100 list — LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman (who ranked No. 64, gave $1 million to Mayday and another $60,000 to various Democratic and liberal committees), Napster co-founder Sean Parker (No. 43; $500,000 to Mayday and $1.1 million to a mix of liberal and conservative committees), Boston investor Vin Ryan (No. 70; $500,000 to Mayday and $400,000 to liberal candidates and groups), billionaire heiress Pat Stryker (No. 52; $300,000 to Mayday and $1 million to liberals) and retired shoe executive Arnold Hiatt (No. 98; $250,000 to Mayday and $500,000 to liberals).

In the end, Mayday PAC suffered embarrassing disappointment in 2014, winning only two out of eight races in which it played. “Obviously, 2014 makes it hard to be optimistic about it in any immediate term,” Lessig said, “but the democracy fails unless we change this system, so I am confident that eventually we’ll figure out how to make this change happen.”

Top conservative donors and their representatives dismissed liberal concerns about the expansion of big money in politics as hypocritical and lacking in context. More than twice as much money was spent on Halloween this year — $7.4 billion — as on federal elections — $3.67 billion — one donor representative pointed out.

And Ronnie Cameron, an Arkansas poultry company owner who ranked 13th on POLITICO’s list, asserted that, while he and his fellow mega-donors may be writing bigger checks these days, it hasn’t fundamentally changed American politics.

“I doubt the amount of influence is any more concentrated in the hand of a few than it was in the 1950s or 1960s,” said Cameron. He donated $4.2 million between his company Mountaire Corp. and his personal checkbook to GOP-allied candidates and groups, ranging from maximum $5,200 donations to successful Senate candidates Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa to $1.3 million worth of checks to the Republican Governors Association to $2 million to Freedom Partners Action Fund, the super PAC affiliated with the Koch brothers’ political operation. “There have always been wealthy individuals that had influence,” Cameron pointed out, adding, “Our country was founded by the wealthy landowners having the authority and representing all the people.”

Faulting POLITICO for omitting contributions from labor unions, which lean left, in its analysis (though it also omitted contributions from most major corporations, which tend to lean right), Cameron asserted that wealthy conservative donors — even at their most potent — would only offset the liberal tendencies of influential institutions. “Between Hollywood, the media and the unions, their huge influence by a relative few has long exceeded the influence paid for by people able and willing to give personal money to deliver a message.”

POLITICO’s analysis relies on FEC data processed by the Center for Responsive Politics (a nonpartisan nonprofit group), supplemented by IRS data aggregated and made available for searching by Political Moneyline, covering donations made during the 2014 cycle, including reports filed this month that detail contributions through the final days of the race. The analysis incorporates checks written by donors, their spouses and closely controlled corporations to federal candidates’ campaigns and national party committees, as well as to political action committees and super PACs registered with the FEC, and to national nonprofit groups established under a section of the Tax Code — 527 — that allows organizations like the Democratic and Republican governors associations and the abortion-rights group EMILY’s List to raise unlimited contributions, provided they disclose their donors to the IRS.

The analysis does not include donations to state-level campaigns and political committees, nor, importantly, does it include an increasingly significant subset of national political groups registered under a section of the Tax Code — 501(c) — that doesn’t require them to disclose their donors. Those groups reported to the FEC that they spent at least $219 million in the midterms, with conservative groups accounting for 69 percent of that, according to CRP. But the groups, which are popular with conservative donors who have expressed concerns about being targeted for their donations, almost certainly spent much more than on political expenses that don’t trigger reporting requirements. A single 501(c) group, the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity, spent around $125 million in 2014.

Donors who gave exclusively or primarily to Democratic candidates and groups held down 52 of the top 100 spots — including by far the biggest donor of disclosed 2014 cash: retired San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer.

He donated more than $74 million to Democratic candidates and supportive committees, but it was the way he gave that highlighted both the potential impact and the limitations of the new breed of mega-donor to shape elections.

Like a handful of the top 100 donors, Steyer spent the majority of his political cash — $66.9million — through a super PAC he created and funded to pursue his main issue: elevating climate change in the political debate. Yet the PAC, NextGen Climate Action, won only three of the seven races in which it spent cash, prompting grumbling from ostensible allies that he may have overestimated voters’ — and his fellow liberal donors’ — interest in the issue, and that he misspent his cash on sometimes bizarre ads accusing Republican candidates of being beholden to Big Oil and challenging the Koch brothers, whose multinational industrial conglomerate includes a substantial fossil fuel portfolio, to a debate on climate change.

In a post-election statement, Steyer cast his 2014 spending spree, which amounted to exponentially more than he’d ever spent in politics, as a learning experience, and forecast another major outlay in 2016. Declaring “this is only the beginning,” he said, “I may be new to politics, but there’s one thing I know — investing in democracy is, without question, a winning proposition.”

The second biggest donor, billionaire former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, also spent much of his cash — about half of his $27.7 million total — through his own PAC, Independence USA PAC. And, like Steyer, Bloomberg had mixed results that raised questions about the effectiveness of his strategy, which sometimes seemed in conflict with itself. For instance, in the campaign’s final month, Bloomberg, whose fortune stems from his eponymous media and data company, donated $1.25 million to the RGA and $1.6 million to the DGA.

Bloomberg concluded he got much more bang for his buck on his animating causes — gun control, healthier food choices and education reform — by directing his cash away from the national level. “Change is really possible at the state and local level,” he told POLITICO after the election.

Meanwhile, the smaller money, a category Republicans won in the last midterm cycle, swung to favor Democrats in 2014. When micro-contributions of $200 or less were tallied through Oct. 15 — the period covered by the most recent FEC reports that CRP had comprehensively analyzed — Democrats were outraising Republicans by a total of $205.3 million to $150.7 million.

Campaigns aren’t required to disclose the names or precise amounts of donations that fall short of the $200 threshold, so it’s impossible to know with certainty how many donors accounted for that haul. But the Campaign Finance Institute estimates that the average so-called unitemized donor gives $75, which would mean that roughly 4.75 million donors combined to give the $356 million donated through mid-October.

Of course, the final number of small donors will increase — perhaps significantly — when the final three weeks’ worth of contributions are tallied. But that will be offset at least partially by the number of donors whose aggregate contributions to a committee will cross the $200 threshold — moving them from the category of unitemized micro-donors into the mid-size donor tier.

When all the donations are tallied and analyzed, 2014 is likely to be noteworthy for two other milestones on the opposite end of the spectrum from the growth of mega-donations: It’s on pace to be the first midterm election since 1990 — the earliest cycle for which CRP performed such an analysis — in which the overall number of traceable donations declined. Through late October, there were 666,773 individual donors who had given more than $200, as compared to the 817,464 who gave during 2010, according to CRP. It’s also likely to be the first midterm since 1990 when the candidates’ campaigns spent less than in the preceding midterm election.

The decline in candidate spending, though, is more than offset by the increase in spending by super PACs and other groups that can accept huge contributions from the ultra-rich. The trajectory is pointing to a heyday of mega-donors, asserted GOP consultant Mark McKinnon, who co-founded Mayday with Lessig.

“When 100 big donors give as much almost 5 million small donors, with whom do we expect candidates to spend their time, and whose interests do we think they will represent?” McKinnon asked. “That’s not democracy. That’s oligarchy.”

Don’t write the obituary for small donors just yet, though, cautioned California vintner John Jordan, whose $2.4 million in 2014 donations supporting conservatives ranked him 28th on POLITICO’s top donor list.

“Small donor activity is probably the best leading indicator for voter intensity in your own party,” he said. “A fired-up activist is going to talk to friends and neighbors, is going to post on Facebook, is going to volunteer at the campaign. So a small donor’s value is really much greater than a small contribution,” said Jordan.

On the other side of the spectrum, plenty of wealthy donors in recent years have gotten questionable returns on their donations, asserted Jordan, who last year started his own PAC (to which he donated $1.7 million) after questioning the effectiveness of bigger GOP-allied super PACs like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, to which he had been a donor in 2012.

“I’ve seen a lot of people write a lot of big checks to a lot of big super PACs and achieve absolutely nothing. And I’ve seen a group of small grass-roots donors like the tea party just kind of rear up out of nowhere and, if the time and place is right, have enormous influence,” he said. “Money is always going to be in politics, and it always has been. All money buys is the candidate’s ability to make their case.”